Haitian Protesters Call For Bloodshed As Americans Try To Flee

February 7, 1986|By Craig Crawford of The Sentinel Staff

As military vehicles fanned the streets of Cap Haitien, protest leaders in Haiti's second largest city called for violent demonstrations today, said Americans who are scrambling for ways out of the city.

Cut off from journalists by a fearful government, observers said the northern city where most of the recent agitation has taken place could erupt in bloodshed again if many of its 80,000 residents respond to protest leaflets distributed Thursday.

The leaflets call for the biggest demonstrations to date and tell people how to make hand-held bombs, said Don DeHart, 53, of Palm Harbor, Fla., in a telephone interview.

DeHart said he did not know how many Americans are still trapped in Cap Haitien, but U.S. embassy officials and United Nations personnel have fled the city.

An American consular officer sent to Cap Haitien last week has left the city, State Department spokeswoman Kate Marshall said Thursday.

About 4,000 soldiers arrived Tuesday in Cap Haitien as demonstrators, responding to anti-American broadcasts from Cuba, began carrying Soviet flags. DeHart said most of the soldiers left Wednesday when the communist broadcasts announced American naval ships were poised off the coast. The broadcasts are untrue, according to the State Department.

The military exodus eased tensions by Wednesday afternoon.

City streets sprang back to life as shops opened and people hoped for American help. By nightfall, sporadic gunfire had begun, DeHart said.

Tension was mounting again by Thursday morning, DeHart said, when protest leaders, disappointed by no news of American help, began agitating crowds and passing out leaflets. The remaining soldiers began speeding around the city in military trucks.

''We can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs,'' one protest leader told DeHart.

''That's the Haitian way of saying they can't get their freedom without losing their lives,'' said DeHart's wife, Eva, 47, in Palm Harbor.

In 1968, the couple started For Haiti With Love, a group that builds churches and schools, and arranges for medical aid in mountain villages such as Pilate, near Cap Haitien.

When the violence escalated last week, they were escorting a group of Indiana dentists who were treating patients in a free clinic run by For Haiti with Love.